What does it mean for your life to matter?

Is the drive to matter, sometimes stronger than the drive to survive?

We humans talk a lot about happiness and pleasure and meaning, but what if the real engine

underneath all of it is the need to feel that we count?

Is it possible that depression and extremism and ambition all stem from the same psychological

source? When is political polarization less about beliefs and more about threatened significance.

Today we're going to speak with philosopher and writer Rebecca Goldstein, who has written a new

book on what matters to people and why and why it's not the same for everyone.

And why mattering is a fundamental instinct that underlies all the others.

Welcome to Intercosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand how we experience the world. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

When I was younger, one of the great mentors I got to work with was Francis Crick, who had won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.

As you may know, in the second half of Crick's career,

he turned from studying genetics to studying the brain. And specifically, the question of how

the physical stuff of the brain gives rise to consciousness. Now, Crick had a chalkboard that was

full of ideas and equations,

but the most striking thing to me was that right in the middle of the board

outlined in a big, thick rectangle, was a single word.

And this word represented to him one of the central mysteries of biology.

The word was meaning. In other words, he had a better understanding

than most people on the planet of the vast and intricate biology that makes up the human brain,

...